Background Hand hygiene may mitigate the spread of COVID-19 in community settings; however, empirical evidence is limited. Given reports of similar transmission mechanisms for COVID-19 and seasonal coronaviruses, we investigated whether hand hygiene impacted the risk of acquiring seasonal coronavirus infections. Methods Data were drawn from three successive winter cohorts (2006-2009) of the England-wide Flu Watch study. Participants ( n=1633) provided baseline estimates of hand hygiene behaviour. Coronavirus infections were identified from nasal swabs using RT-PCR. Poisson mixed models estimated the effect of hand hygiene on personal risk of coronavirus illness, both unadjusted and adjusted for confounding by age and healthcare worker status. Results Moderate-frequency handwashing (6-10 times per day) predicted a lower personal risk of coronavirus infection (adjusted incidence rate ratio (aIRR) =0.64, p=0.04). There was no evidence for a dose-response effect of handwashing, with results for higher levels of hand hygiene (&gt;10 times per day) not significant (aIRR =0.83, p=0.42). Conclusions This is the first empirical evidence that regular handwashing can reduce personal risk of acquiring seasonal coronavirus infection. These findings support clear public health messaging around the protective effects of hand washing in the context of the current COVID-19 pandemic.The advent of large-scale fluorescence and electronic microscopy techniques along with maturing image analysis is giving life sciences a deluge of geometrical objects in 2D/3D(+t) to deal with. These objects take the form of large scale, localised, precise, single cell, quantitative data such as cells' positions, shapes, trajectories or lineages, axon traces in whole brains atlases or varied intracellular protein localisations, often in multiple experimental conditions. The data mining of those geometrical objects requires a variety of mathematical and computational tools of diverse accessibility and complexity. Here we present a new Python library for quantitative 3D geometry called GeNePy3D which helps handle and mine information and knowledge from geometric data, providing a unified application programming interface (API) to methods from several domains including computational geometry, scale space methods or spatial statistics. By framing this library as generically as possible, and by linking it to as many state-of-the-art reference algorithms and projects as needed, we help render those often specialist methods accessible to a larger community. We exemplify the usefulness of the GeNePy3D toolbox by re-analysing a recently published whole-brain zebrafish neuronal atlas, with other applications and examples available online. Along with an open source, documented and exemplified code, we release reusable containers to allow for convenient and wide usability and increased reproducibility.Introduction Patient-derived xenografts (PDX) can be used to explore tumour pathophysiology and could be useful to better understand therapeutic response in breast cancer. PDX from mammary tumours are usually made from metastatic tumours. Thus, PDX from primary mammary tumours or after neoadjuvant treatment are still rare. This study aims to assess the feasibility to establish xenografts from tumour samples of patients with triple negative or luminal B breast cancer in neoadjuvant, adjuvant or metastatic setting. Methods XENOBREAST is a single-centre and prospective study. This feasibility pilot trial aims to produce xenografts from tumour samples of patients with triple negative or luminal B breast cancer. Patient enrolment is expected to take 3 years 85 patients will be enrolled and followed for 28 months. Additional blood samples will be taken as part of the study. Surgical specimens from post-NAC surgery, primary surgery or surgical excision of the metastases will be collected to establish PDX. Histomolecular characteristics of the established PDX will be investigated and compared with the initial histomolecular profile of the collected tumours to ensure that they are well-established. Ethics and dissemination XENOBREAST belongs to category 2 interventional research on the human person. This study has been approved by the Sud Méditerranée IV - Montpellier ethics committee. It is conducted notably in accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki and General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). https://www.selleckchem.com/ALK.html Study data and findings will be published in peer-reviewed medical journals. We also plan to present the study and all data at national congresses and conferences. Registration ClinicalTrials.gov ID NCT04133077; registered on October 21, 2019.Background Cardiac, hepatic and pancreatic T2* measured by magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) has been proven to be an accurate and non-invasive method for measuring iron overload in iron overload conditions. There is accumulating evidence that pancreatic iron can predict cardiac iron in young children because the pancreas loads earlier than the heart. The aim of our study was to assess the relationships between pancreatic T2* values and pancreatic iron loading with cardiac dysfunctions and liver and cardiac iron among patients with β-thalassaemia major (βTM) and sickle cell disease (SCD). Methods 40 βTM and 20 transfusion-dependant SCD patients were included along with 60 healthy age and sex-matched controls. Echocardiography and Tissue Doppler Imaging were performed for all subjects as well as the control group. Hepatic, cardiac and pancreatic iron overload in cases were assessed by MRI T2*. Results The mean age of our patients was 13.7 years with mean frequency of transfusion/year 12. Mean cardiac T2* was 32.9 ms and mean myocardial iron concentration was 0.7 mg/g; One patient had cardiac iron overload of moderate severity. Mean pancreatic T2* was 22.3 ms with 20 patients having mild pancreatic iron overload. Pancreatic T2* correlated positively peak late diastolic velocity at septal mitral annulus (r=0.269, p=0.038), peak early diastolic velocity at tricuspid annulus (r=0.430, p=0.001) and mitral annular plane systolic excursion (r=0.326, p=0.01); and negatively with end systolic pulmonary artery pressure (r=-0.343, p=0.007) and main pulmonary artery diameter (MPA) (r=-0.259, p=0.046). We couldn't test the predictability of pancreatic T2* in relation to cardiac T2* as only one patient had cardiac T2* less then 20 ms. Conclusion There was a relationship between pancreatic iron siderosis with cardiac dysfunction in multi-transfused patients with βTM and SCD. No direct relation between pancreatic iron and cardiac siderosis was detected.